As emergency workers waded through the rubble of Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on Sunday, also being picked over was the extent to which the attack might damage Russian President Vladimir Putin — or be used as a pretext to bolster his war in Ukraine.
The terror group ISIS has claimed responsibility after camouflaged men stormed the concert hall Friday night and killed at least 137 people with guns, knives and bombs.
For Putin, who has sold his seemingly lifelong leadership on maintaining order, the massacre will be at least deeply embarrassing. It could even weaken his ironclad rule, particularly after he dismissed American warnings that such an attack might be imminent, some experts say.
“It certainly doesn’t strengthen him,” said John Lough, an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, a London think tank. “Within the elite itself, there are going to be questions about where the focus has been: Why has there been all this rhetoric about the war in Ukraine, when in actual fact there are other dangers much closer to home?”
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian former oil tycoon turned arch Putin critic, called security lapses that allowed the attack to proceed “a complete failure of a police state” in a post on X.
It has also not gone unnoticed that Putin waited some 20 hours after the attack to address his country.
When he did give a five-minute speech Saturday, Putin did not mention ISIS, whose Afghan affiliate, ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for the assault, or refer to the likely failure of intelligence services to prevent the assault or the security services to thwart it.
Instead he suggested that Ukraine had aided the attackers by helping plan their failed escape.
“They tried to hide and moved toward Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the…
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